| Mark Merlis | |
| Birth Date: | 9 March 1950 |
| Birth Place: | Framingham, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Nationality: | American |
| Alma Mater: | Wesleyan University Brown University |
| Awards: | Ferro-Grumley Award (1995) |
| Spouse: | Robert Ashe |
Mark Merlis (March 9, 1950 – August 15, 2017[1]) was an American writer and health policy analyst.[2] [3]
Born in Framingham, Massachusetts on March 9, 1950 and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Merlis attended Wesleyan University and Brown University. He subsequently took a job with the Maryland Department of Health to support himself while writing. In 1987, he took a job with the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress as a social legislation specialist, and was involved in the creation of the Ryan White Care Act.
Beginning in the 1990s, Merlis published a series of novels. His first novel, American Studies, was published in 1994[4] and won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Literature and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1995,[3] and his second, An Arrow's Flight, was published in 1998[5] and won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.[3] He published two further novels during his lifetime, Man About Town in 2003[6] and JD in 2015.[7] [8]
Merlis lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and worked both as an author and an independent health policy consultant.[3]
Merlis died on August 15, 2017, at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, from pneumonia associated with ALS.[1] He was sixty-seven years old. He is survived by his husband of many years, Robert Ashe.[3]